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Earth Acquires a Quasi-Moon
richard_za writes "Earth has acquired a so called quasi-moon, an asteroid: 2003 YN1, which will encircle us for the next couple of years while it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path. Full story on News24. It was found by team led by Paul Chodas, an asteroid specialist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. An orbit simulation can be seen in this Java applet."
Here's a link to Discovery Channel's coverage without the need for registration.
Mike
Didn't want to break with tradition and RTFA, so, can I see it? Naked eye?
"That's no Moon!"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
First a new planet now a new moon
... which will encircle us for the next couple of ears...
I'm unfamiliar with this unit of measurement.
We like the quasi-mooooon.
Have you no remorse? It's one thing to slashdot a web page, but java? You can't rightly do that!
Yeah I know, it's a joke. The class is just like any other static file.
How long is that in earth time?
Earth has acquired a so called quasi-moon, an asteroid: 2003 YN1, which will encircle us for the next couple of ears .
And exactly whose ears are we going to sacrifice to the asteroid god in order to have it here in our presence?
I've never heard of this site, but I expect you'll hear a lot of complaints...
"KuduClub requires a small, monthly fee from US$2,95 or US$9.95 for the broadband package."
At least the New York Times only steals your soul... this actually takes your money. Anyone have a link/text/whatever so we can read it?
Despite the warnings about only 2-body maths being used in the applet, it's too tempting not to run it forwards and backwards a bit just to see... It turns out the closest approach would have been roughly a week before it was noticed on Dec 8th 2003, at 0.0455 AU or ~6,807,000 km. A fair old distance :-)
:-)
I guess it's not too often you get your own asteroid orbiting, but this is still going to be a looong way away for a lot of the time. Maybe when it does get close though, we can send something up to it - beats the hell out of going out to the Oort cloud, even if you do find a few planets along the way
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
What sort of eclipse can we expect from this? To experience a solar eclipse from a temporary sattelite would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Here's the screenshot:
.
O o
Sun:earth:new "moon"
Not to scale. All rights reserved.
Obligatory Star Wars, Obligatory Simpsons, Obligatory Futurama, Obligatory Family Guy and Obligatory bash.org quotes MUST FUCKING DIE. They're not funny anymore. It's an idiotic configuration of three words. Goddammit.
If it's orbiting the sun, then how can it be called "our" moon? Just because it's vaguely in our vicinity?
And this is a dupe from 4 years ago.
Earth's Second Moon 2nd Moon Orbiting Earth Discovered
Not even a little evil?
QUASI-evil?
The Diet Coke of evil?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I only have two, so I can only help so much.
"Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll"
Would those be the final front-ears?
You must think in Russian.
I'm a clownfish... I know funny!
"..while it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path..."
If only Isac Newton knew this...
Hahaha, did anyone else notice they typoed years into ears? Funneh!!!
...you insensitive clod....
I have misplaced my pants.
Where is this thing going after being here for a few years?
Maybe it could be interesting to send up some equipment to it, and get it a long way without fuel costs.
Maybe we can get interesting pictures from places we never thought would be any interesting.
he'll know what to do
Neo: "There is no Moon."
"...this is a Moon!"
(shudders) Now dealing with mental image of naked Australian backsides...
This is where the serious fun begins.
There is an entire branch of astronomy that uses distributed observations to map the size and shapes of asteroids using occultations (eclipses with distant stars). When an asteroid passes in front a distant star, the star winks out and then reappears. Knowing the duration (start and stop times) of the occultation, the location of the observer, and the orbits of the Erath and asteroid lets people estimate the size and shape of the asteroid. International Occultation and Timing Association collects data from telescopes around the world (many in the hands of hobbyists) and uses the data to make these estimates.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You just HAD to put the link in the description.....poor server. Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load. NEO Home Page
A single voice cried out in horror, and was suddenly silenced.
This is the third asteroid we've found which has an orbit tied loosely to that of the Earth. The others are 3753 Cruithne and 2002 AA29. You can see pictures and applets and read about these other bodies at Paul Wiegert's web site:
http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
troll.
It will be the first time I ever saw this.
Hey, let's change orbit of that thing and have another space station, this time on a real celestial body :)
They're here to put the kibash on any more plans for Mars.
"...it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path."
It sticks itself in reverse to avoid making a complete loop.
But how can this be a moon of Earth if it orbits THE SUN?
No sig for you!!
I wanted to call it "George" but the teenager in the house has christened it "Foof." (Two o's, like "moon". Her 1st draft was naturally scatological.) C'mon /.ers, let's come up with a name!
If a horse had dropped on him we wouldn't have to take calculus classes...
I know that's what I'd do.
Let's name it Wormwood! Give the religious folk a hell of a time.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Let me go find that quatrain. I'm sure there was something about millions dead and nuclear winter and slashdotting the original site...
Aussie: That ain't a planet, this IS a planet.
Bart: That no planet, thats a quasi moon.
Aussie: Alright alright, I see you've played planetry quasi moony before then.
Jonathanjk.com
Damn. What's up with all these asteroids in the last several years? There's been several close passes by these things. Is the asteroid belt giving throwing these things?
it's called the keith!
(with apologies to fred schneider)
Please stop with the ears jokes. I can hardly breath from laughing so hard.
Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load.
=
Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to slashdot.org
Can't we all just take turns?
*DrugCheese rants*
It's a probe cleverly disguised as an asteroid.
/. until it was too late and we were all under the inevitable invasion in iteration 2006.
Too bad no one believed the message posted on
Two drunks are walking along. One drunk says to the other, "What a beautiful night, look at the moon." The other drunk stops and looks at his drunk friend. "You're wrong, that's not the moon, that's the sun." They began to argue when they come upon another drunk. They asked, "Sir, could you please help settle our argument? Tell us what that thing is up in the sky that's shining. Is it the moon or the sun?" The third drunk looked at the sky and said, "Sorry, I don't live around here."
Remote operating system guess: Solaris 8 early access beta through actual release Uptime 8.798 days (since Thu Mar 18 15:30:06 2004) Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 384 seconds
With the discovery of this new moon, I'm offering you the opportunity to get in on the action! Just like the original moon, you can now own your own section of the new moon.
It looks like the folks at Quizno's have already setup a web page to pay homage to this new "moon" of ours.
Here's your report card:
(X) confrontational attitude
(X) can recognize something neat
( ) reading skills
(X) enjoys cool applets
What I want to know, is why isn't anyone pushing to steer these NEO rocks into one of the Lagrange points [http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/la grange.html] and construct a REAL space habitat instead of sending a man to Mars or establishing a "permanent" lunar base? It would be pretty cheap to do so, as the technology to build robots to do the grunt work is pretty much within our grasp now. Having sufficient bulk would make for a decent radiation shield, and even a micro-gravity environment is preferable to the zero-G of the ISS, as dust+debris are more readily managed.
There are at least 3 known small (a few kilometers in diameter) rocks that are close enough to send out a robot "tug" with a large amount of propellant, some good-sized solar arrays (or a nuclear battery) to power an ion drive. All the tug needs to do is match orbits with the asteroid, position itself, make contact and gently push it in the right direction. It would take a long time to put the asteroid into one of the L4/L5 points, but as tugs expire, new ones can be sent (or send additional tugs to speed up the process) at a very minimal cost, with a very simple trade-off of time vs money.
I would expect that by the time we get multiple asteroids in close proximity to each other in one of the stable Lagrange points, we would be able to send much more capable robotic workers to either tie the asteroids together with titanium I-beams, or better yet, tether them together with carbon fiber cables and put some spin on the assemblage to keep them under tension. Initially, we could construct living spaces inside the rocks, but as capabilities increase, and more material is placed into the mix, it would be possible to create a poor man's RingWorld with considerable acreage. It's a great place to harvest solar power, base elaborate interplanetary communications facilities and astronomical observatories.
The costs of maintaining an effort like this are very small, and it has the benefit of collecting wandering rocks that might one day drop in on us and put them to good use. Far better than programs to blow them up with nukes, and Bruce Willis won't be around to save us forever.
I knew a clownfish. You, sir, are no clownfish.
i nominate H. Ross. Perot. The astroid gods would be very pleased with such a large pair of ears.
I was looking at the orbits of Pluto and Neptune on the applet, and noticed that Pluto is shown as inside Neptunes orbit at present and until 2011, but I was under the impression that Pluto was once again the farthest planet, as of 1999, and wouldn't pass in again until 2226. So I'm not sure their orbits are correct....
The Discovery site article mentions another famous quasi-moon, "Cluithne".
Actually it's Cruithne, with an "r".
P.S. Don't tell bush, but I think there may be oil up there and I would like to avoid invasion for now.
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
Well, we tend to view the solar system with a staionary sun, not a stationary Earth. The path that the moon takes around the sun from this perspective is relatively close to an eliptical orbit, with a variation back and forth across the Earth's orbital path.
Viewing the sun as staionary, the moon doesn't really go around the Earth, it just passes back and forth across it's path.
I have misplaced my pants.
Because the links are bogus - they point to porno shots
This is not a self-referential sig.
nasa's site slashdotted. gg nub.
This is a knife!
Go get some nice asian girl to give you a Hong Kong massage.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke
attempt no landing here.
Mooooooooon!!!
Funny as in "this smells funny".
the slashdot effect:
Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load.
sig(h)
Because of the Lagrange point physics, the relative velocity of those objects (compared to whatever you are building there) will be very small. It should not be an issue to set up a solar array to power laser micro-meteorite defenses (not to blow the the debris out of the sky, just to push it out of the way), possibly use a COIL laser untill the solar power is up. The next step might be to set up a very large solar-powered laser for planetary asteroid defense.
, 12 543,473579,00.html
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0
1. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
When the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha measured the Harvard Bridge in Boston with the body of MIT freshman Oliver Smoot, the length was determined to be 'exactly 364.4 Smoots plus or minus an ear'. Obviously they know what's going on.
So even if I vaporize half my socks matching pairs are easy to create.
I wonder how much KE one would need to throw a sock 7,000,000km starting from the surface of the Earth?
Throwing socks that hard would be an effective superpower, but "Sockman" doesn't exactly strike fear into the hearts of evildoers.
Well, when you go for a jog, I will concede that you are orbiting the Earth and not the sun.
I have misplaced my pants.
Perelandra would be nice too.
"while it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path"
Uh, wouldn't it be easier to fly an elliptical orbit?
IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist), but from playing with the Java applet, it appears that 2003YN1 is going to come surprisingly close to Earth within the next decade.
In January of 2007, for instance, the asteroid will be trailing Earth by about 0.5 AU. In November of 2020, Earth will be trailing the asteroid by a hair's breadth (in cosmic terms) of 0.1 AU.
Now, four light-minutes (or even 0.75 light-minutes) isn't exactly spitting distance, but how often do we have asteroids within such close proximity to Earth, in such convenient orbits? I imagine it would be fairly cheap to launch a probe to match orbits with the asteroid, rendezvous with it and do some science. A return mission in 2020 would be a distinct possibility (if it were useful, which I'm not sure it would be).
Now, the budgetary and planning requirements for a 2007 mission are probably unmanageable at this late date, especially given NASA's (or ESA's) current budgets. But we've got 16 years to plan for a 2020 mission. What manner of experiments might we be able to devise in the intervening years? What possibilities can you think of?
1) Establish an unmanned observatory on the asteroid
2) Land a power source and construct a propulsion system (using a linear accelerator to eject the asteroid's own mass?) and try to change the asteroid's orbit. Depending on the composition of that baby, it might be worth a pretty penny if we could put it into near Earth orbit for mining.
3) Same as #2, only turn the asteroid into a long-term habitat. Free giant space station, anyone?
OK, so these ideas are a bit far-fetched, possibly venturing into the realm of science fiction. But dreams have to start somewhere...
We seem to be having trouble & high failure rates with just sending tiny robotic probes to Mars, and we can hardly even keep a couple of rusty buckets in low earth orbit operating. Moving a small asteroid gently (maybe using solar sails) should be well within our technological capabilities, but it doesn't seem like we have our act together enough to do it.
Right now, the US, one of the richest nations, doesn't even seem to be able to pay for health care or secondary education, but we are willing to pay hundreds of billions to have our shoes x-rayed in order to guard against an infinitesimal chance of getting killed by terrorists. So, you see, the problems aren't technical, they are psychological, social, and political.
(Besides, you really don't want the "oh, that was kilometers" kinds of errors with such a project.)
Sorry this is a little off-topic, but I just thought I'd say that I don't seem to be able to get access to any nasa.gov sites at the moment. All of them are giving me a DNS error. Frustrating, since we've had a couple of interesting NASA related stories today.
I'm wondering if other people are having similar problems.
The simulator link is incorrect. It points to 2004 YN1. The correct link. For a good view in the simulator, tilt the 3D view to straight down, center on earth and zoom in all the way.
New Scientist has an interesting article in their latest issue.
For a more technical explanation, read the paper presented at the Lunary Planetary Science Conference last week.
Stop mooning our planet!
The picture on the Discovery Channel coverage is not the asteroid in question. I know this means I need to get out more, but I instantly recognized that picture as 243 Ida and its tiny satellite Dactyl.
Ydco co
The moon is bright over Lebanon tonight! The Lebanese moon looks down shim! sham! shikam!!! Cattle Explodes! Cow shrapnel drips off a tree cascades into a mothers tear. Poor little boy who goes into battle and comes back dead or worse comes back a man. Why don't you warn them moon? Why don't you say duck or scram? But the moon will not. The moon just sits there grinning like a corpse at a Dean Martin roast. What are you laughing at moon? Why don't you share it with the whole class moon? The moon laughs knowingly, the moon laughs, the moon, the.
What if said backside belonged to Nichole Kidman, or Elle Macpherson?
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Oh no, don't tell me that I will have to listen to PMS symptoms twice a month now....
Well, we could deploy a combination of a solar-powered ion-thruster and a mass driver, or we could rig up a solar sail and try and tack the asteroid into position. I imagine if we can slow down its relative velocity, we can let the Sun do the rest of the work. If we can put it into the right trajectory, we can work off a lot of the kinetic energy through gravity transfers. Besides, we don't need this asteroid in orbit overnight - as long as we change its course to orbit the Sun and keep it within accessible range, we can move it closer later with better technology.
"That's no moon! That's battle station!" And it definitely belongs to us, you insensitive clod! You, for one, will welcome us as your new alien overlords!
There you are, staring at me again.
Will our quasi-president announce a quasi-mission to land on this quasi-moon?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
What kind of horse wears elliptical shoes?
coz it is close to us
we like the moooon!
but not as much as a spoon
cuz thats more use for eating soup
Thank you and a fork isnt very useful for that
unless it has got many vegetables
and then you might be better off with a
chop-stick
unlike the moon
it is up in the sky
its up there very high
but not as high
as maybe
digibles or zeppelins
or lightbulbs
and maybe clouds
and puffins also I think maybe
they go quite high too
maybe not as high as the moon
coz the moon is very high
we like the moon
the moon is very useful everyone
everybody like the moon
because it light up the sky at night
and it lovely
and it makes the tide go and we like it
but not as much as cheese
we really like cheese
we like zeppelins
we really like them
and we like kelp and we like moose
and we like deer and we like marmots
and we like all the fluffy animals
we really like the moon
Thanks to Leo's Lyrics and Joel and Alex Veitch
these aren't the moons you're looking for.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
it's not space junk?
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
... by moving it to the appropriate Lagrange point and later (when carbon nanotubes can be spun into long enough threads) using it to build our space elevator to the moon.
This is not as crazy as it may seem; it's do-able.
I wish I could ride on that rocket...
The space.com article mentions that the orbital path of these pseudo moons eventually allows them to escape the gravitational pull of the sun, at which time they presumably bugger off and make themselves a cup of tea.
Looking at the java applet, the orbital path of this thing looks very much like the orbital path of Pluto, only on a smaller scale. Does anyone know if there are any predictions of Pluto heading off for a cuppa in the next few millennia?
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
Actually, the most internationally renowned about Australian arse would be Kylie Minogue.
Curiously, it is the subject of discussion of straight AND gay men. I'm not quite sure what to make of that...
I'd say "sign me up for the next manned moon landing mission!!"
This news gave me an idea about providing samples of Martian rock without going into the gravity well of Mars, and I would like you to point out any fallacies in my reasoning.
If the Earth-Moon system has pseudo-satellites, so will Mars. The orbital perturbations by Jupiter will eventually remove them, but on the other hand the vicinity to the asteroid belt will cause many more impacts, creating new pseudosatellites to Mars.
These pieces of martian rock will not be contaminated like the meteorites found in the Antarctic, nor do they require a very complex sample return mission.
Ion engines, or even ordinary chemical engines would be suitable, and there is no need for heat shields, parachutes, or in-situ propellant production. Maybe even a private organization might have the the resources required ?
Yours
Birger Johansson
I've been playing with the applet, and it seems that this quasi-moon will impact at jan. 4th, 2004! The funny thing is, I haven't heard anything on the news...
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